Breakup of the near-continuous winter sea
ice into discrete summer ice floes is an important transition that dictates the
evolution and fate of the marginal ice zone (MIZ) of the Arctic Ocean.
During the spring of 2014, more than 50 autonomous drifting buoys were deployed
in four separate clusters on the sea ice in the Beaufort Sea, as part of the
Office of Naval Research MIZ program. These systems measured the
ocean-ice-atmosphere properties at their location whilst the sea ice parameters
in the surrounding area of these buoy clusters were continuously monitored by
satellite TerraSAR-X Synthetic Aperture Radar. This approach provided a unique
Lagrangian view of the winter-to-summer transition of sea ice breakup and floe
size distribution at each cluster between March and August. The results show
the critical timings of a) temporary breakup of winter sea ice coinciding with
strong wind events and b) spring breakup (during surface melt, melt ponding and
drainage) leading to distinctive summer ice floes. Importantly our results
suggest that summer sea ice floe distribution is potentially affected by the
state of winter sea ice, including the composition and fracturing (caused by
deformation events) of winter sea ice, and that substantial mid-summer breakup
of sea ice floes is likely linked to the timing of thermodynamic melt of sea
ice in the area. As the rate of deformation and thermodynamic melt of sea ice
has been increasing in the MIZ in the Beaufort Sea, our results suggest that
these elevated factors would promote faster and more enhanced breakup of sea
ice, leading to a higher melt rate of sea ice and thus a more rapid advance of
the summer MIZ.

The video for this talk should appear here if JavaScript is enabled.If it doesn't, something may have gone wrong with our embedded player.We'll get it fixed as soon as possible.